Phenology is the study of natural occurrences through the seasons. It is, perhaps, the oldest science; and yet, with climate change all over the news, it is still very important today. This page is my way to share some of my phenological observations through the year, and let others share their observations with me!

Followers

Friday, December 21, 2012

Happy Winter!

Winter Solstice... the ray of hope in our darkest days. In science, as in life, it may be that as we stand on the precipice, looking at the beginning of months of hardship and trial, things start to get just a little bit brighter. Winter truly is a season of scarcity and challenges for animals that don't have the human luxuries of central heating and grocery store food. Plants still face months of dormancy before they will green with new life, so food sources are severely limited... caches painstakingly collected and stored in the fall, a few leftover seeds, bark and twigs. The succulent newness of leafy greens is so far away it's hardly imaginable, even to me. And this at the time when the body most needs energy to heat itself. It would be a bleak outlook, I think, if animals had the capacity to look forward into the future.

And yet... after months of our days growing oppressively short, they will... almost imperceptibly at first... start to lengthen. Today is the winter solstice, when the earth's tilt causes the sun to hit (at 5:12 am local time) its southern-most angle of shine upon the earth's surface. For the next 6 months, as we travel around the sun on our topsy-turvy cosmic journey, we northern-hemisphere-dwellers will get the sun's light more and more directly each day. Eventually the sun's rays will shine upon us directly enough to start to warm the earth's surface. And so the first calendar day of winter is also the day it begins to recede, to gradually lose its fight. Our glimmer of light just as the hard times begin.

And winter this year tried to start with a show of seasonal power. Now, I don't want to minimize the first winter storm of the year for those around the Midwest who were involved in traffic accidents or travel delays or whatever, but... for us, it was kind of a bust. It began with rain... steady, drumming rain that kept me awake Wednesday night and into the small hours of Thursday morning, and continued to fall all day Thursday. The world was wet and puddly and dreary and drippy... and relatively warm, hitting the mid-40s. The forecasters' predicted snowfall decreased as the hour of temperature drop drew near... but we still didn't even hit the large 2-6 inch target that meteorologists left open for us. Around 4 pm Thursday the rain turned to sleet and wet heavy snow, which did mess with rush hour but didn't last very long into the night. I went to bed with my driveway's blacktop still showing and I awoke to the same sight.

That's not to say that winter didn't dawn with a fierce bite. Piercing winds whip across the prairies and fields. I look out, through wildly shaking locust branches, at a wind turbine whose motion is so fast it looks like a blurry circle. The small amount of snow that fell has frozen solid, a crunchy crust covering cars and pavement, trees and grasses. Now that the sun has finally risen on this shortest day of the year, the frozen drops on the tree branches catch the light and sparkle. Diamonds all over are spectacular holiday decorations. Plus, it's cold -- in the mid 20s but those winds from the north make it feel much colder.